Blurry vision filled my eyes. Wait, was I still alive? My hopefulness shattered as I looked at a body on the ground. Black hair, green eyes, that old blue hoodie that I never took off, it was mine, alright. Blood pooled on the ground around it, the sight of it made me want to retch.

     “Wait, then what am I now?” I asked myself.

     I slowly blended my neck down to see a transparent body of myself. Great, I was a ghost.

     “Technically, a spirit,” replied Lexie.

     I jumped. Startled, I turned around to see that she, too was a ghost, or, more properly, a spirit. How did she know what I was thinking?

     “Do we have mind reading powers, now?” I asked Lexie.

     “Agni, the accident,” she started, “It did more than kill us.”

     She was right. She and I could hear each other’s thoughts clearly. I immediately remembered why we were in this mess. Boiling anger filled me to the brim for our selfish companions.

     “Why are we here?” I asked.

     “I don’t know. Nothing makes sense anymore,” she replied.

     So, we’re spirits now. I didn’t exactly imagine living to 100, but 14 was a bit short for my standards.

     “Are we going to be spirits forever?” Said Lexie, sounding scared.

     “I don’t think so,” I stated, “ Spirits are normally lost until they find something that leads them to their purpose.”

     I read up on a lot of these things for a school assignment. I can’t remember what it was about. My memories were starting to leave me. We searched our pockets for anything that might help. At the same time, both of us pulled out golden pocket watches. They weren’t normal, though. The face was inscribed with the numbers 24 to 1. Between each were intervals, sixty, to be exact. The hands were ticking down. We had a bit less than 24 hours before they got to zero. And we didn’t want to know what would happen then.

     We sat, or, more properly, hovered there for a whole hour deciding what to do and where to go. Our reality was timeless, so we could’ve been talking for a few minutes or a few years in our minds without the pocket watches. We only stopped and realized we had been talking for a whole hour when we heard the watches peacefully chime. The sound was like a choir of… well, whatever those things with wings in heaven were called.

     “I’m forgetting more and more,” I thought to myself.

     Obviously Lexie heard it as well, as we looked at each other with intensifying concern. What if we were to forget each other, and our entire past lives?

     The watches interrupted us, saying with a loud, singsong voice, “Twenty-three hours remaining.”

     We have to hurry. We then looked at each other and decided we should visit our parents one last time. The trip to their houses was effortless. We just glided in the air, taking no more than five minutes to get to the houses, when in reality, it would have taken hours.

     When we finally got there, they were both empty. We searched everywhere we could, but there was no one around.

     “Are they…” I started.

     “No, they can’t be,” Lexie cried, tears welling up in her amber eyes, “I don’t care if they abandoned us. This isn’t right!”

     A sudden thought hit me.

     “I don’t remember anything about our physics classes, but what if they didn’t make the jump!” I exclaimed excitedly.

     “Why are you excited? Did they mean nothing to you?” She asked, clearly hurt.

     “They jumped with the right equipment, but didn’t make it! They landed, not hardly enough to turn up like us, but definitely hard enough for a trip to the hospital!” I reasoned.

     “You’re a genius!” She exclaimed as we started to glide back to Vegas.

     I could make out the rusty, old, yet still neon sign of Parkview Ridge hospital. There were many ambulances outside of it, and it was clearly the one receiving patients from the fall. We traveled room through room, keeping out every noise but the ones of our parents. We finally neared the E.R.

     “This must be it!” I excitedly whispered.

     We glided in through the double doors, and saw four motionless beings before us. A black haired man and a red haired woman, mine, were the ones I visited first. They were still breathing. I looked at them longingly, wishing I could talk to them one last time. Naturally, Lexie went over to check on her parents first. We met back and solemnly glided out of the hospital, perching on the roof.

     “They didn’t mean it. It was only a fight-or-flight thing,” Lexie started, “If only…”

     “No,” I interrupted, “It doesn’t matter what they meant. They did it, and now these are the consequences!”

     I quickly realized I was shouting as I looked over to see a crying Lexie.

     “I’m sorry,” I started, “I shouldn’t have said that. Are you okay?”

     She turned to me with eyes hardened with pain, looked me in the eye, and said, “You’re right. This is all their fault.”

     I turned to her to try to console her, but before I could even open my mouth, the watches chimed again.

     The same singsong voice recited, somewhat monotonously, “Twelve hours remaining.”

     Wow. Time went by quickly. We were half way through our watches.

     “You remember Bartley?” Asked Lexie, though I wasn’t sure if it was a question, as it sounded more like a lost memory.

     With quite a fury I said, “Yeah, of course.”

     He was the pugnacious bully of our school. He picked on everyone, regardless of social status. He even made one of our teachers his victim. But, there was no one he taunted more than Lexie and I, especially me. I was kind of short, and he’d distort it. The only thing that was distorted was his mind. I’d always eye roll it off, and he’d never get to me, but I’d always hated him with the fury of a thousand suns.

     She continued, “He never believed in ghosts. Let’s teach him a lesson.”

     I grinned a malicious smile. I’ve always read those Reddit posts about how someone did this amazing revenge to someone else, and I’ve always been eager to do it to Bartley.

     This smile stayed on even as we neared his house. I wondered if we’d be able to touch anything, and now was the time to test it. I picked up a pad of sticky notes and a pen. I wrote in stuttered, frantic letters WAKE UP. I got several notes and stuck them to his gaming equipment. I sat on the nearby couch waiting for him to come. I checked around the corner of the hallway and saw Bartley trotting over. He had the look in his eyes that said he was about to start to play. I watched as he took a note off of his controller, looking at it weirdly.

     I heard him mutter to himself, “Justin. I can never trust that weasel.”

     Justin was one of his friends. He was known for his pranks. I watched as he walked across the room to turn on his television set. He saw the note I put there and warily took it off, squinting at the letters.

     “Justin doesn’t write like this,” he muttered, starting to look worried.

     He ran back to his chair and grabbed his headphones. Bartley put them on his ears and at first, noticed nothing wrong with them. I put the note inside of the earpiece. His face contorted, as he noticed something was scratching his ear. He took the headphones off, glanced at the inside, and saw the small, folded, yellow note I placed inside.

     Without even touching or unfolding the note, he screamed, “STOP! Whoever’s our there, show yourself!”

     I maliciously complied, and while I couldn’t become visible, I blew into his right ear to show him that I was there. The guy shuddered, looked around the room, keeping his eyes on me a second longer than anything else, and then proceeded to continue gaming.

     I flew over to Lexie, who was sitting in the other room, placing more notes inside of his laptop, and arranging his files to spell Wake Up. We both laughed as I told her what I did.

     A few minutes later, I heard him yelling. He just lost, and was proceeding to scream like a banshee. Perfect. I watched as Lexie tentatively touched a porcelain vase beside her, looking to be worth a fortune. It immediately fell onto the floor and shattered into many pieces. I stifled a laugh, but then realized that no one could hear me, so I laughed harder than I ever had laughed before.

     I heard a dumbfounded, “Whaaaatttttt?”

     It came from Bartley’s direction. I looked over my shoulder and saw a confused Bartley stomping towards us, his headphones still dangling from his neck. I heard another scream coming from upstairs. I could only assume it was from one of his parents. His mother, her face half covered in makeup, ran downstairs and proceeded to shout at Bartley.

     “I KNEW I should have never given you those games,” She shouted, “Give me those!”

     Bartley shouted as his mother ripped the headphones off of his neck and threw them to the floor.

     “You broke my vase, so I’ll break your games!” Bartley’s mother shouted as she stomped her foot on the clearly expensive headphones, crushing them to a pulp.

     “But… but…” Bartley gulped, “There were notes…. There were ghosts!”

     His mother, having none of it screamed, “I’m DONE with your excuses! To your room, NOW!”

     We watched and snickered as we saw a clearly defeated Bartley stomp upstairs. Our plan had worked flawlessly.

     We glided to the roof, and sat there, talking about our epic revenge.

     “That was awesome!” I exclaimed.

     “Yeah. That payback for what he’s done to us was the most hilarious thing I have ever done!” She continued.

     We sat there in silence, thinking about what he did to us. My mind moved to a more solemn topic about our lives.

     The familiar singsong voice and chiming interrupted us, saying, “Five hours remaining.”

     “Is that all we wanted to do? Just revenge in our last hours?” I asked Lexie.

     Clearly thinking about it for a moment, she responded with, “Maybe we could go say bye to our friends one last time?”

     “I’d like that,” I responded as we glided to our friends’ houses.

     We parted paths, Lexie heading to a house colored with a light baby blue, and I heading to a forest green house, with a small, glass greenhouse jutting out of it. I flew into Quinn’s bedroom through his glass window, with the familiar Venus Fly Trap growing on the sill. His head was on his desk, cluttered with paper. His computer had one email opened on it. I read it, and immediately knew that he had found out about the fall. I sympathetically looked at him for a second, and then decided to write him a note, this time less terrifying than Bartley’s. I found some stationary on his desk, grabbed one of his feather pens from his collection, and started to write. I only stopped when my watch chimed, letting me know that I only had one hour left. I tucked the note under his keyboard, and, hearing me, Quinn looked up. Before he could say a word, I rushed out of the window, jostling the Venus Fly Trap again. He saw this, and his mouth agape, whispered a goodbye.

     We agreed to meet in the park. Where was she?! I saw familiar brown, slightly transparent hair by a bush. I glided over to the shrub, and saw Lexie. We looked at each other, knowing our jobs were done, and sat together in silence.

     “Hey,” I started after awhile, “How much time do we have left?”

     As if to answer my question, the watches chimed again.

     The singsong voice, now sounding much more urgent said, “Thirty seconds remaining.

     Oh no.